*
Slowly, she moved into the bathroom and shut the door softly behind her. She sat on the toilet, sluicing her mouth with toothpaste at the same time. Then she flushed the toilet and splashed her face with water. Still much the same, she thought, with a glance at the mirror. She heard the loud gurgle of the pipes and wondered if that would wake him. Then she took a raincoat from the cupboard in the hall, and left a note. Andreas, thanks so much for dinner. I’ve borrowed a raincoat. The oldest one you had. She tore that up. Andreas, my dear young man. I’ve gone away for a couple of days. Good luck with learning your fucks. Love, Rosa. That wasn’t quite right either. Andreas, my dear young pup. Thanks for dinner. I’m going away for a couple of days. Rosa. Rosa X. Rosa xxx. Back soon, Rosa x. So she took that one and folded it into her pocket. Andreas, thanks for dinner. Sorry to go without saying goodbye – I had to catch a train. Will call you on return. Took a raincoat – the oldest you have (I hope!), R x.
*
Outside she crossed the bridge and stepped under the Westway, alert to the morning clash of tyres and steel. She surrendered herself to the wind and the rain. Fumbling with the raincoat, she walked with her head bowed. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL; she saw the words on a lashed and rain-licked wall. She turned at a shop selling kimonos and passed on to Golborne Road. Mod’s Hair Salon was already busy, and in the window a woman was going blonde. The shops had their fronts open, and their shelves were filled with ornamental tagines. The street smelt of fish and coffee. A woman passed by wearing a sealskin coat. And there was a woman walking slowly in a green jellaba. A man sat on a bench in his shop. He was selling old ceramic baths and antiquarian mirrors. He had on a ski hat and shorts, and he was holding a cigarette and a mobile phone. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, ‘right, yeah’, as she passed him. From the upper windows of a building a round of applause broke out. Thank you, thank you all very much, thought Rosa. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL. With the stone turrets of the Trellick Tower above her, she went to Café O’Porto and ordered coffee and custard tarts. It lifted her mood. She found a discarded paper and rustled through it. She ate a couple of tarts and sipped her coffee. She whistled a tune and wrote: I’d not mention a man, I’d take no account of him, if he were the richest of men, no matter if he had a huge number of good things, unless his prowess in war were beyond compare. She paused, and then she gripped her pen again. To the Guardians of the Laws, with my apologies for behaving so badly. She stared around at the others: a woman feeding a custard tart to her child; a man with a hacking bronchial cough, drinking greedy gulps of coffee in between his fits. To her left was another man, this one with a tie and an edgy stare. She recognised that look, the look of a man who had worked hard already, and would keep going all day. He was the last man to leave every evening, devoted to his four feet of office space. It had made him toad-like, flabby and flattened. There was a crowd who knew the café owner, speaking Portuguese into a cloud of smoke. The toad-faced man was assessing her with a beady glare. He had pushed his chair against the window and was leaning back, surveying the room. The room, or her? She was sure he had been staring. She was so certain that she was on the verge of turning round and asking him what he wanted. YOU! What do you want? How can I help you? Is there anything I can do? She knew she was being absurd, at one level she was quite lucid and aware that this was mental rambling, superfluous, even preposterous. She understood that a man is allowed to stare. Why look at me? she was thinking nonetheless. I can assure you I’m as befogged as you are! From my vantage point, even with the width of idle months between my former self and this person you see before you, I still have nothing to say on the compelling subject of TEMP. She was trying to clear her thoughts. Staring is quite common, she thought. There’s nothing to stop him, no law set against those who stare. He stared at you, then he stared at the man with the distressing cough. He stared at the counter where the cakes are, at the women talking, at his newspaper. He’s been staring all over the place. No doubt you are staring too, she said to herself. If she was honest she had given a good eyeing to the woman with a child. So she bowed her head and looked at her custard tart. She thought of the things she had to do. She gripped her pen and began a list.
Get a job (embrace your inner toad)
Wash your clothes
Phone Liam and ask about the furniture
Get a place to stay
Go to the bank and negotiate an extension on your overdraft
Meet your father
Explain to Andreas
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.
Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge
Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest
Buy Judy and Will some presents
Catch a train
Go to the Lakes
Understand the notion of participation
Be kind to their children
Stop thinking about Liam and Grace
The fifth combination?
Be bloody bold and TEMP
Retrieve the plot. Guard it well
Stop writing lists
Go to your father and beg! she wrote. Then get out of here for a night. Even a night, that would kick-start her conscience. She really might come back galvanised and determined to stop wasting her time. She only needed a change of scene, a simple remedy, age-old, well-practised, generally advocated. A nice dose of difference. Dr Kamen had been ragging on about holidays, taking it easy, others had said the same, Grace and Whitchurch and even the other day Jess had said it, though that had been a feint to get her out of the flat. Now, Rosa was quietly optimistic. A few gaudy fells, a few evenings spent listening to the soft sounds of the English countryside, a pub lunch, a change of mode, and she would send off applications while she was there. She would write to people who might want an amanuensis, someone roughly literate to proofread their work. She would try to find that sort of job while she was away. If not, she would seek out a good office and die quietly into it. She would learn to love the paper shredder, the coffee break, the woman with the squeaky voice who delivered sandwiches, the whirr of the lift running people up and down the building, the tea-stained kitchen, the photocopier, the round robins and office games, the squabbles over territories no one really wanted anyway, the conspicuous waste of time, the death in life! She would learn to love it all. You! You the toad-face, over there! I’ll come back with you, whenever you like. Just name the day and we’ll walk hand in hand, back to the open-plan office, and I’ll never ask WHAT THE TEMP again. Just tell me when. Now she told herself to stop. There was still Madame la Braze, who hadn’t called her yet. She would sort a few things out. Andreas, for one. She would certainly write to Andreas from the Lakes. Safely ensconced, far away, she would come clean. She would explain everything and ask him for a place to stay. Oh God, she thought, shaking her head. Tell him you’re a despairing toad. That you have dyspepsia. As long as she kept limping round to Andreas, she would never really resolve anything. But it was absurd to call him a distraction. He was so tranquil. Whenever she thought of him she felt a stabbing sense of guilt. Guilt or lust, she couldn’t quite tell. She desired him even as she sat there, and that confused her. She thought of his body – perfectly rounded buttocks, hair-downed legs, straight back, smooth skin, long nose, brown eyes – it amused her that she saw him buttocks up, first the moon-like rounds of his arse and then the rest. Cerebral, she thought. Now she wanted to call him. With Liam they suffered from platonic drift. By the end they were lying side by side in a sexless bed. Still, with Andreas she felt the sort of basic passion she had entirely forgotten. It recalled her youth when she was, she now saw, green in judgement but perfectly handsome in an unformed way. She wanted to go back to his flat and lie in bed with him. She wanted to touch hi
s skin. Would that be so bad, she thought? Still she couldn’t decide, so she stayed there writing in her notebook.
She turned again and caught the ragged toad-face looking towards her. Now the tables between them were starting to clear. Any moment he would say something to her; she could see him leaning forward, licking his lips. He would be stern and decisive: Come back now! What do you think you’re doing? You’ve been out of work for months, and what have you got to show for yourself? NOTHING! A few books read, but that will hardly help! A few walks through the city! Who do you think you are, Henry James? Samuel Johnson? Get back where you belong! She could imagine him phrasing the order. Her last line of defence, the mother, put the child in her buggy and walked away. This made Rosa anxious, so she retreated. Banished by her inner fool, she took her tart and walked. As she left she looked over at the man and saw he was staring straight ahead. She went slowly along Golborne Road. The wind was still up, and the street was awash with coasting litter, leaves and cardboard and plastic bags. Everyone was a swirling mass of clothes and coats, smothered in ravaged cloth, holding their umbrellas to the wind. Rosa walked with an eye on her reflection in the windows. She was another tousled ruin as she walked, hair unkempt, coat flapping. Another burst of rain and she started to walk faster. The damp stalls were selling wine and cheese. A wooden table blocked the path so she edged round it. She heard a car behind her and stepped out of the gutter. Outside the shops were boxes of brightly coloured Turkish delight, scattered with sugar. Rows of dates and figs. And in another shop they were selling halal meat, Cash and Carry said the sign. Now the shop owners were pulling plastic sheets over the boxes, holding up their hands against the rain. She had once bought a table in a shop round here, she thought, just one of the bits of furniture Liam was refusing to pay her for. Her reflection was bouncing alongside her, this flapping form. Everyone was sublimely indifferent to her; the man selling copies of the Koran, collar up, the woman selling baguettes and tomatoes, hood over her eyes, the man going slowly past on a bicycle, nearly beaten by the wind.
At Jess’s flat, she put the key in the door and stepped into the hall. Concerned about the carpet, she scraped her feet on the mat. Once inside, she cast the raincoat onto a hook in the hall, wrung out her jumper and put it on a radiator. She undressed as she walked to the bathroom and then stepped into the shower. She poured shampoo on her hair. Things were quite simple, she thought, if you just kept yourself clean and warm. She closed her eyes and lifted her face. She flexed her thigh muscles, drawing her legs tightly together. Her skin was red now from the warmth of the water. As she watched water coursing down her body, she stood her ground. Here she was, a tall woman with wide shoulders. Her arms had always been lean. Her stomach was taut. Her legs were thin; her shins were covered in fine brown hairs. She agreed, she needed to bulk up a bit. Apart from that, she was attractive enough. She would attract men for a while, then they would deem her too old – most of them – and she would attract fewer of them. But she didn’t need a horde. She didn’t want an adoring mob behind her!
Later she turned off the shower and towelled herself down. She dressed quickly, putting on her jeans and sweater. She slung a few changes of clothes into a bag. She borrowed some books that might yet goad her into action. She took a notebook, an apple and some painkillers. She felt like a child, running away. In this spirit she made herself a cheese sandwich and wrapped it in paper. She took out the rubbish and slammed it into a bin outside, noticed the bins were overflowing but walked straight past them. The smell of rotten food was briefly pungent, whipped away by the wind. She was nervous as she walked down the steps. She was briefly devastated that Jess would be so pleased she had gone. She felt a low sense of melancholy about her small, rootless life. It was a shame, when you left a place and people were glad. But she was anomalous, the day was moving swiftly and a mass of people moved along the road. Above the clouds were grey, drifting across a pale sky. She was drawn into it all, the gliding shapes of cars and people.
She went to the shops, fearful of arriving empty-handed. Portobello Road was awash with people buying lunch. Crowds hung around the stalls, people holding multicoloured bags of fruit. She saw a green patch of park, gated off from the street. With her neck craned, Rosa saw the shops were full of winter cuts, big boots and long coats, clothes for dressing up in. The windows glinted in the sun, though the day was cold.
Wrapped in a thin coat, the wind gusting at her, Rosa stepped through the crowds. In the first shop she came to she bought bath salts and in the next some costly chocolates in a scenic box. She added in a couple of children’s books, splashed with cheerful colours. She had a small spasm when she handed it over, her ravaged credit card. The presents looked fine; the shop assistant wrapped them in pink paper, and wrapped a ribbon round them. There was a label which Rosa filled in. With love from Rosa. That was because she couldn’t remember the names – or ages – of Judy’s children. She was quite sure they would have everything they needed. But she stacked up presents anyway, eager to show willing. At noon she saw she was late, so she ran along panting like a hound. The street was flooded with people. With the inevitable bad luck of the furious, Rosa missed the bus. It passed her as Rosa ran up to the stop, and she saw no sign of another bus, so she clenched her fists and carried on. LYLA, said the sign. A STAR REALLY WILL FALL. And soon. THE KILLS were still celebrating the launch of their single. She went along fast enough, enjoying the wind on her cheeks, admiring the dextrous way she danced around other people, but then she turned onto Kensington Park Road and the street started winding uphill, which slowed her down. She passed a brasserie with fake flaming lamps and a yellow-stoned church like a piece of textured mustard and when she was at the top, sweating and muttering under her breath, she stood for a moment and watched three buses pass her. That made her curse but she was on a downhill slope now and she picked up speed towards Notting Hill. Then the crowds destroyed her momentum, it was impossible to get round them quickly, however dextrously she danced, and she was forced to slow down, raise her hands, make offerings to angry people. Apologising for everything, she kept running. She couldn’t look at the time because she knew she was late. She was sweating like a dog, but this had its advantages, she thought, at least her father would understand she had made an effort, really stubbed her toes on the kerbstones getting there.
She stood at the lights wheezing and marking time, and when they changed she passed quickly across the road, stumbling on the corner. She was gasping for breath as she ran. Antique shops in Victorian village style, and some of the buildings were older still. There was a pub garlanded in flowers. A bright blue house, she passed it swiftly, noting how clean it was. Polished windows. It was wrong to say the city was grimy. There were parts that surprised you; they were kept so clean. Here she was, avoiding a man with his hand outstretched, and finally she found the door and pushed it open. She arrived in a breathy state of panic, thinking that she must usher on lunch and be sure to catch the train. Across the restaurant she saw her father sitting – slouched – and stood there for a moment, paralysed by guilt. She was stock still and weighted down with it. It held her, until she saw his head turn, and found him not so sad and old from a different angle.
Her father had never really liked Liam. When she called him up and explained it all, he was sanguine. He was restrained and didn’t say, ‘I always disliked that untrustworthy man.’ That might have been the truth, but her father never said these sorts of things. He almost never said what he thought. He was an inscrutable man. It wasn’t that he was dishonest; he just hated to hurt anyone’s feelings by presenting them with something so unwieldy as the truth. So he dissembled, constantly, and no one had really known him except Rosa’s mother. Well, and Rosa knew him a little, though he rarely told her the truth either. It was an indication of how things had turned that he had been so honest recently. Rosa knew she was like him. She was ruder than her father, but she still had bouts of politeness, moments of insane performance, more stressful than an
argument. It was like clamping a brace onto yourself, it left you with a sense of pressure, a dull ache.
He had once taken Liam down to the pub and they had, according to Liam, talked about the history of the railway and its effects on tourism in Bristol. They had also discussed the origins of dog racing. Liam had said it was all most informative. But they were never good friends. They shook hands readily; on special occasions they extended themselves to a mutual slap on the back. They gave each other suitable books at Christmas. It never quite sparked. Liam was a practised adept, good at putting people at their ease. He spilled words into pauses as if he was following instructions. Rosa’s father was silent for much of the time, shy and undemonstrative, except when he disagreed really violently with someone. Still it was clear to Rosa that they didn’t enjoy talking to each other. With Rosa’s mother, Liam was gracious and respectfully flirtatious. That was wily, though at the time it was most likely well intentioned. Perhaps sincere. He had always kissed her mother when they met, warmly, with conviction. It seemed so at the time.
Rosa’s father was tall and thin, with gaunt cheeks and large pale eyes. He had looked old for decades, perhaps because of his predisposition to overwork and smoking. One side of his family had been Flemish, some of them merchant seamen who arrived in Britain in the seventeenth century. They settled in Bristol, but little was known about them. There were odd relics: some fine pipes, a seaman’s trunk which Rosa’s father said his great-great-grandfather found floating in the harbour at Bristol. Rosa never believed him. The men of that famly went to sea; the women stayed on land. Neither sex had written memoirs or poems, and they had receded like the tide across the mudflats. Rosa’s father tried to be active, to play up to his nautical heritage, but he was hardly robust. He swam a little, and he played occasional games of tennis. In the autumn he sometimes liked to roam through the forests along the Avon Gorge, whistling out of tune. But really he was natively sedentary: he was a historian, he taught for a while at the university, and he had his own private archive of dusty books, their pages spotted with age. The shelves of his study were layered with ancient manuscripts in rolls, file cards, folders, neat boxes, drafts of his writings. For years he had written about local history and the Arthurian legends. Once her parents had a fight and Rosa’s mother told him to sell his books, his manuscripts in coils. ‘A waste of a life,’ she said. Then she was pale and penitent for a week. Perhaps as a result, his great work on the Round Table remained unfinished. For a while Rosa entertained a fear that it would be left for her to edit after his death. Now she thought Sarah could do it – Sarah with her scholarly air and round glasses, who taught him Spanish when he was trying to rebuild his life, as his friends had told him to – her father who took advice better than Rosa and was determined to salvage something. He met Sarah and Rosa hardly wanted to imagine the rest. Sarah was scented; she smelt of floral perfumes and she wore Omega workshop prints and sandals. That made it hard to love her. She told stories about everyday things, pleasing, convivial stories that Rosa might have liked, had her mood been better. But why, she thought, panting at the door, why the hell am I thinking about Sarah?
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